Tag Archives for Ned Potter

I’m writing today after a slight dip in internet productivity because one sentence from my last post has been just digging deeper and deeper into the center of my mind:

I wish I could figure out how to get to where the ideas are.

An interesting result of a google image search for “where the ideas are”:

Sort of an animal lover's version of Escher.

Obviously, Google is at the center of the labyrinth of ideas. Basic level: intuitive berry picking as the foundation of information access. Larger picture: everything in the cloud, copyright (and sometimes privacy) bedamned.

As Ned Potter explains in this gloriously short presentation (also, sweet app dude), librarians are no longer “gatekeepers of knowledge” (which inherently implies a hierarchy of users who, depending on the librarians’ whims, may or may not deserve access to the information they’re seeking – I seen it) and have to be more like Gandalf, sort of freezing the water as it comes out of the firehose so that people don’t explode when they try to drink it. Made that one up myself, guys!

Enough jargon. Basically, I am on an intellectual quest to find

where the ideas are.

Oh, is it here? PSYCH! Just a baby and David Bowie.

I feel significantly closer after a library meeting yesterday where we discussed Amy Edmonson’s Strategies for Learning from Failure. The central concept is, as it was at NETSL, will be at MLA next week, and most likely will be in a talk to any group of two or more people in or about a library for the foreseeable future, try ANYTHING but nothing. And reward for trying, even if it doesn’t work. While I wasn’t sure what the response would be from the director and assistant director, the round table was overwhelmingly positive, and we were told explicitly that it’s better to own your failure and ask forgiveness than to be hesitant to try.

Basically I took this to mean that I have permission to try new things, and to create my own little space where some ideas are. I started by putting together my own standing desk (awesome, by the way, especially when I can listen to music out loud and sort of dance a little bit). It’s a good start, but I will certainly still keeping an eye on John Palfrey, Ned Potter and a few other David Bowies of the biblioblogosphere.